By: Chris McGarel Photos: Ashley Jones |
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The Lexington is packed to capacity tonight for this troupe’s first London show since the release of their second long-player and InsideOut debut, The Unravelling. A sold out show is testimony to (and reward for) the hard work in the intervening years since 2009’s Buried Alone: Tales of Crushing Defeat. Tonight’s audience has been built on tireless touring with like-minded sonic mavericks The Fierce and the Dead and Trojan Horse as well as the buzz created by the latest album with its major label reach.
There are familiar faces dotted around: regular Knifeworld gig attendees, as well as one Channel 5 talkshow presenter (and erstwhile Hawkwind collaborator) who has staked his claim in the front row from the off. Will Kavus Torabi et al have The Right Stuff to warrant the capacity crowd?
‘I Can Teach You How To Lose A Fight’ proves that the band’s ambitious multi-faceted sound on record can not only be replicated live but thrums with vitality in the room. Torabi’s unhinged wide-eyed delivery is magnetic. The wind section infuses the manic menace with a Tom & Jerry soundtrack levity – feelgood music for the spurned lover on the brink of madness: “Why’d you grow those teeth in your heart?”
This is a 21st century schizoid band. Half the stage is occupied by traditional rock instruments, the remainder is given over to a chamber prog/Rock In Opposition ensemble. Chloe Herrington on bassoon, stage centre, recalls the late Lindsay Cooper (Henry Cow) and forms the corpus callosum bridging the hemispheres of the strange Knifeworld brain, receiving and exchanging visual cues from stage right. The groovily furious riffing of ‘Don’t Land On Me’ is a prime example of the dextrous ability of this brain to work as one unit. It is genuinely thrilling to watch – a seminal Canterbury-scene outfit with the whimsy sucked out and replaced by bile and laudanum.
A mid-set departure from The Unravelling revisits the debut album and several tracks from the band’s two EPs. The seamless weaving-in of this earlier material illustrates that Torabi’s ambitious craft appeared fully-formed at Knifeworld’s inception. Perhaps the listening and gig-going public are finally catching up on his vision.
‘The Skulls We Buried Have Regrown Their Eyes’ mixes his macabre story-telling with the minimalism and polyrhythms of Steve Reich. Again it is impressed on us the seeming ease with which such disparate styles mesh and bloom in the live setting. Sound-checking these musicians must be a royal pain for the FOH mix to be this polished.
An encore of ‘Me To The Future Of You’ sees us heading out into the bustling streets of Islington with its trendy types and scenesters and thinking “We know a secret you don’t know” and feeling a warm glow of smugness with an undercurrent of haunted, fragile sanity.
